Many SEO practitioners believe that backlinks are the only path to ranking. But the reality is that even with zero backlinks, a website can still quickly gain a large amount of organic traffic. This is not theory, but a real-life case – a new site less than a year old, without any backlink building efforts, achieved a vertical surge in traffic.
This article will not teach you how to build backlinks, but rather reveal three equally powerful, yet often overlooked, SEO strategies. They don't rely on backlinks, but can get Google to actively drive traffic to your website.
Assume you have a fitness website. Your first article is "Dumbbell Bench Press Tutorial," and you expect Google to send you traffic. What will Google's reaction be? It will say: On what grounds? Just because you wrote one fitness article, does that prove you are an authority in the fitness domain?
Google's Quality Assessor Guidelines repeatedly emphasize the E-E-A-T principle (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), and one of the core ways to build authority is to demonstrate comprehensive coverage of a topic. This isn't achievable by writing just a few articles; it requires a systematic topical coverage strategy.
Many people misunderstand the concept of topical authority. They think that by writing enough articles, they can build authority. But in reality, not all articles contribute equally to topical authority.
Take "gym training" as an example. If you write an article about dumbbell bench presses, it directly relates to the core topic and contributes significantly to topical authority. But if you write an article about "hip flexor stretches," while it also happens in the gym, its relevance is significantly weaker than that of a dumbbell bench press.
This means: some articles are more effective than others in helping you build topical authority. You should prioritize creating these highly relevant articles.
You can use ChatGPT to quickly build a topic map. For instance, you can ask: "Give me 30 topics that are highly semantically related to 'gym training' but are distinct from each other." ChatGPT will return core training movements like bench press, squats, deadlifts, overhead presses, etc., without including stretching content.
Next, for each topic, delve deeper: "Give me 10 different keyword variations for bench press, ensuring each variation addresses a different search intent." You'll get: How to increase bench press strength, best bench press training plan, bench press technique, and so on.
Repeat this process, and you'll obtain a list of 300 highly relevant articles. This is your topic map and your priority list for building topical authority.
Although we don't actively build links, we can allow them to flow in naturally. The method is: become the topical authority for a type of linkable asset.
For example, the Exploding Topics website focuses on publishing various statistical articles. An article like "Blockchain Statistics," has earned backlinks from 907 referring domains. Why? Because statistics naturally attract citations.
But for others to link to you, they must see your content. How can your content be seen? The answer is still topical authority – publishing a large volume of statistical content. Exploding Topics published 47 articles with "statistics," establishing authority in the data sphere, and then backlinks started pouring in.
Other types of linkable assets include: infographics (creating charts for various aspects of the industry), controversial opinions (e.g., "Why the Bench Press Isn't As Effective As You Think"), and calculator tools (ChatGPT can help you write the code for these).
For teams that need to produce high-quality blog content in bulk, SEOInfra offers a more efficient solution. It can convert high-quality content sources like YouTube videos and audio into original blog posts in bulk, and automatically optimize and publish them with SEO structure, making the process of building topical authority more automated and scalable.
"How can zero-search-volume keywords possibly bring traffic?" This is many people's first reaction. But data speaks: A keyword "high ticket affiliate marketing niches," with a reported search volume of 0-10 on Ahrefs, brought 152 visits in three months.
This isn't an isolated case, but a severely overlooked traffic goldmine.
Firstly, the search volume estimations from SEO tools are inherently inaccurate. Of the 8 billion searches Google handles daily, 15% are brand new search terms, making it impossible for tools to accurately estimate the search volume for all of them.
Secondly, Google's BERT algorithm update in 2019 significantly improved its ability to understand complex, non-standard search requests. For example, if a user searches "can you get medicine for someone pharmacy," Google couldn't understand it before, but now it can accurately identify user intent and direct traffic.
This creates a perfect opportunity: Tools show zero search volume -> SEO practitioners dismiss it as valueless and skip it -> Keyword competition is extremely low -> But Google's algorithm knows how to drive traffic to these terms.
A real case: While working at FreshBooks, Steve Toth focused on mining zero-search-volume questions from "People Also Ask" and published 650 related articles on the Hub directory. The result? This directory receives 1.2 million visits per month.
The first source: Answer The Public. Enter a topic and export a large list of low-competition keywords.
The second source: People Also Ask. Don't manually click and collect; use the free tool SEO Minion to export all questions to a spreadsheet with one click.
The third source: Reddit. Find relevant subreddits (e.g., r/ethereum) and then enter in the Google search bar: site:reddit.com/r/ethereum "how do I". This will return 4,000 low-competition topics.
The fourth source: ChatGPT. Directly ask: "Give me 10 low-search-volume keywords about Bitcoin." It will return: Bitcoin Lightning Network, Bitcoin sidechains, Bitcoin multisig, etc. Verifying on Ahrefs, more than half show zero search volume.
The cumulative effect of these keywords is astonishing. A single keyword might only bring a few dozen visits, but when you have thousands of them, traffic accumulates like a snowball.
Once you have topical authority and a large pool of keywords, the next step is to make every piece of content "algorithmically perfect." This sounds difficult, but it's actually much simpler than you might think.
This is the most crucial realization: Google has never tasted goji berries and doesn't know what they are, but it knows how to judge if your goji berry article is excellent – by comparing your article to those already ranking on the first page.
Does your article possess all the algorithmic signals of the top-ranking articles? Is it better than the number one result in some aspects? If the answer is yes, Google will rank you.
The first step is research. Take "learn affiliate marketing" as an example:
This is the structure of the number one article, so this structure must be effective.
But don't stop there. Continue researching the second and third ranking articles, extracting their excellent outline elements. For example, the second article uses a step-by-step structure, recommending learning marketing courses and gaining practical experience.
Finally, consolidate all this information into a "super outline" – a collection of all excellent article outlines, covering all their strengths.
The opening paragraph is crucial. It needs to achieve three things:
For the main body content, using a content optimization tool like Surfer is highly recommended. It analyzes top-ranking articles and provides real-time suggestions on keyword density, article structure, and other metrics as you write, helping you create "algorithmically perfect" articles.
First, cite authoritative sources and add external links within your article. Google's Quality Assessor Guidelines clearly state that not citing sources is a characteristic of low-quality websites.
Second, optimize for NLP (Natural Language Processing) friendliness. Simply put, organize content in a way that algorithms can easily understand. You don't need to understand NLP technology; just ask ChatGPT to help you: "Answer in a concise, NLP-friendly 1-2 sentences: How to learn affiliate marketing?" ChatGPT will return structured, algorithm-friendly answers that are more likely to get featured snippets.
For teams that need to produce this type of optimized content at scale, SEOInfra can automate the entire process from content generation to SEO structure optimization. It not only converts high-quality content sources like videos and audio into blog posts that meet Google's standards but also automatically adapts to standard SEO technical structures, ensuring every piece of content is competitive.
These three strategies, while seemingly independent, share the same underlying logic: convincing Google's algorithm that your website deserves to rank.
Topical authority tells Google: "I have deep coverage in this domain; I am an expert." Zero-search-volume keywords exploit the blind spots of tools and the asymmetry of algorithmic understanding, allowing you to gain traffic with virtually no competition. Perfectly optimized content, on the other hand, speaks the algorithm's language, telling Google: "My article is better than the current number one result."
They don't rely on backlinks because they address more fundamental issues: content quality, topical relevance, and algorithmic suitability. Backlinks are important, but they are just one of over 200 ranking factors. When you excel in other dimensions, the importance of backlinks is diluted.
More importantly, these three strategies are replicable and scalable. You don't need to wait for others to give you backlinks, nor do you need to spend significant time on outreach. You just need to focus on producing high-quality content that meets Google's standards, and leave the rest to the algorithm.
They cannot fully replace it, but they can significantly reduce reliance on backlinks. Backlinks remain an important ranking factor, but when you push content quality, topical authority, and technical optimization to the extreme, you can achieve significant traffic even with zero backlinks. More importantly, when you build topical authority through linkable assets, backlinks will flow in naturally.
No. Data proves that zero search volume shown by tools doesn't mean zero real search volume. 15% of Google's daily searches are new, and tools cannot accurately estimate them. More crucially, zero-search-volume keywords have extremely low competition. Even if a single keyword brings little traffic, the cumulative effect is astonishing when you have thousands of them.
Google cares about content quality, not the method of content production. Using tools like Surfer and ChatGPT to assist in creation is perfectly fine. The key is to ensure that the output content is valuable to users, aligns with search intent, and has been reviewed and optimized by humans. Tools are merely means to improve efficiency; ultimately, content quality is the determining factor for ranking.
There's no fixed number; it depends on your industry's competition and topic scope. Generally, core topics require at least 30-50 highly relevant articles as a foundation. More important are the relevance and quality of the content, not just the quantity. Prioritize covering core content directly related to the topic, then gradually expand to less related content.
Typically, you'll start seeing noticeable results in 2-4 months, entering a period of rapid growth after 6 months. Zero-search-volume keywords rank fastest, usually within a few weeks. Topical authority requires continuous accumulation, but once established, traffic growth will follow an exponential curve. The key is to maintain consistency in content publication and quality.
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